Monthly Archives: April 2006

18 months ago I wrote with praise for President Bush as he made clear that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was intended to protect against the sudden shocks of war. It appears I may have spoken too soon:

President Bush will order the Department of Energy to stop filling the Strategic Petroleum Oil Reserve “in order to get more fuel on the market and help reduce rising gasoline prices.”

In September 2000, then-Gov. George W. Bush criticized President Clinton for proposing to use the strategic oil reserve in response to high prices:

The Strategic Reserve is an insurance policy meant for a sudden disruption of our energy supply or for war. Strategic Reserve should not be used as an attempt to drive down oil prices right before an election. It should not be used for short-term political gain at the cost of long-term national security.

Today, Bush did precisely what he criticized President Clinton for five-and-a-half years ago.

…or, in this case, a free collaborative writing tool. MacZOT are running “BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com“, the second give-away they’ve run in recent weeks. Basically as blogs link to their promotion MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software, in the form of a small price reduction for every link (possibly even down to free) to the highly rated SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys.

In their first promotion I scored a free copy of AppZapper, no apparent strings attached, so it all seems to be legit. As I write the price is already down to $7.60 (normally $35), so it’s quite the bargain. And the price has come down by a couple of dollars just while I’ve been typing. Definitely worth a go.

A common theme here is that politicians are liars, and the fact that the current liars-in-power are Republicans is just a marginal thing. I may be rethinking that following a quite staggering display from our current leaders. TPM Muckraker has the details, but basically the House Republicans put forward an immigration bill that would, among other things, make illegal immigration a felony. Realizing that perhaps they’d gone a bit too far, they then introduced an amendment to make it just a misdemeanor. The Democrats (or at least 191 of them) and 65 Republicans voted against this, not thinking it should be a crime at all. The amendment failed, and the bill with the felony provision still in it passed the house according to the wishes of the Republicans.

Here’s the thing; the Republicans are now running Spanish-language ads blaming the Democrats (who, you may remember, don’t want illegal immigration to be a crime at all) for making it a felony, despite the fact that it was the Republicans who introduced and passed the bill.

I guess now we know what comes after statistics in the Richter scale of lying; just making stuff up directly in the face of evidence that proves you wrong.

Having upgraded the blog to use Widgets, I now visit the widget blog to sate my need for tech. Little did I realize that through them I would find something as essential to modern living as the PMS by RSS widget. Genius.

At times it is most efficient to have your significant other throw the car keys to you, rather than walking over to him or her. Be advised that if your significant other is a) a girl, or b) throws like one, it will not be more efficient if you are standing near some guttering, even if said guttering is 8 feet off the ground.